According to a new report from USA Today, GOP mega donor Paul Singer is helping fund the National Immigration Forum (NIF) for its Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT) initiative. Singer is the founder and CEO of Wall Street hedge fund Elliott Management Corporation and the man who made Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign for president happen.
“Ali Noorani, the forum’s [NIF’s] executive director, said financial resources for the Evangelical Immigration Table’s efforts are coming from a range of supporters, including new conservative donors such as Paul Singer — a hedge fund manager and major donor to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign,” USA Today’s Erin Kelly wrote on Wednesday.
Singer was not just any major donor to Romney’s campaign, he was the major donor. By all accounts, Singer was the reason why Romney won the GOP nomination to face off against Obama.
“[P]erhaps none of Romney’s Wall Street supporters will be more crucial to the candidate’s success, or have more influence on his thinking, than Paul Singer,” Fortune Magazine‘s Michelle Celarier wrote in April 2012.
Romney is so close with Singer that he invested his own money with the donor’s hedge fund. “According to Romney’s financial disclosures, the trust managing his more than $200 million fortune has at least $1 million invested with Elliott,” Fortune‘s Celarier added.
In October 2011, when Singer committed his resources to Romney after his choice candidate New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was not going to run, Politico’s Maggie Haberman wrote that Singer is “one of the biggest “gets” in the Republican bundler community” because he was always “promising to tap his vast donor network and move to get others off the sidelines.”
Haberman also noted then that Singer’s support for Romney came “at a critical moment in the campaign” as Christie and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had just passed on running, and Romney was trying “to consolidate support among major bundlers and establishment figures.”
“He’s become known as a ‘fundraising terrorist’ for his focus and arm-twisting,” Haberman added later in her piece. “And he serves as something of a signal for other donors as to who they should support.”
The EIT group, according to an email sent to Breitbart News, said it is run by NIF. “Early in the formation of the Table’s work, the leadership sought a neutral third-party institution, the National Immigration Forum, to help facilitate our work,” EIT said. In fact, EIT does not even exist as a legal entity and is just a front for the NIF.
Leftwing billionaire and devout atheist George Soros funds the NIF, and has donated money to Sojourners CEO Jim Wallis. Wallis sits on the board of EIT, and is listed as one of the “heads” of the organization.
When Breitbart News first exposed the Soros funding of NIF, NIF’s control over EIT, and the discrepancy of who paid for advertisements the EIT was running, prominent NIF member Rev. Samuel Rodriguez attempted to claim that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was involved in paying for those ads.
The Chamber, of course, denied those claims later in a statement to Breitbart News’ Michael Patrick Leahy. “The Chamber has contributed to the National Immigration Forum generally, and has done so for years,” the Chamber’s Blaire Latoff Holmes said. “But we have never given to the National Immigration Forum for ads or given any money to the Evangelical Immigration Table. Whether or not the National Immigration Forum contributed to this ad, I don’t know – you will have to check with them.”
To this date, neither NIF nor EIT has specified where that money came from or who really paid for it.
With this new ad campaign rolling out on behalf of EIT, Noorani is claiming Singer is paying for the ads. This ad buy is worth $400,000, according to USA Today.
In a quote picked up by the Huffington Post, Noorani argued that while Soros does donate to his NIF, he and other leftist donors “are not even asked to support the Evangelical Immigration Table’s work.”
“But really, this effort transcends politics,” Noorani said. “The story is not just that conservative businesses, families and individuals are supporting a broad movement for reform. It’s really the 60,000-plus evangelicals in America who have signed up as Pray for Reform prayer partners, and the local congregations whose hearts and minds have changed.”
The Institutional Left’s focus on creating support for the Senate’s Gang of Eight immigration bill, and the Left’s collaboration with GOP establishment figures like Singer, is hardly limited to evangelicals. On Wednesday morning, Breitbart News reported that American Action Network (AAN), the group of former Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), used likely faulty economic data compiled by three leftist foundations–the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and Unbound Philanthropy–data first pushed by President Barack Obama’s White House, to argue the Senate immigration bill actually “creates jobs.”
Doug Holtz-Eakin, the head of American Action Forum (AAF), AAN’s sister group, appears to have broken American Economic Association standards by not releasing his economic model, assumptions made or specifics regarding the data inputs used for AAN’s tool used to claim amnesty would “create jobs.”
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